Water for Emergencies, and House Update

[helwen]

Remembered this sometime in the past few weeks, but kept forgetting to post it. Earlier this summer I wrote about disaster preparedness, and one of the things was making sure you had enough water. A few folks mentioned not having a lot of space for storage, although we all came up with a few creative methods (behind the shoes, if you have a deep closet, for instance).

But when I was a kid we didn't have bottled water. I'm sure it existed -- at least the expensive Perrier mineral water, and suchlike. Whenever a really big storm was going to come through and it looked like we might lose power, water, etc., we would fill all the biggest cooking pots with water, and a bath tub. Instantly, you have some water for drinking, cooking (assuming a way to cook or a food that just needs to soak for a while), and minimal washing.

For those who don't have a nice big bath tub, if you have any sort of plastic bins (Rubbermaid, Sterlite, etc.) -- you could empty it/them out and store water in them. I'd use that water for washing, mostly, but as long as they were clean to start with, the water should be tolerable and safe enough for a week or so -- just keep the lid on and keep it in a cool place out of direct sunlight.

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House Update

The floor in upstairs bathroom is leveled and mostly tiled. L is working on it more today.

The crew on Saturday got window and door trim cut for the living/dining room, and primed some of the upstairs hallway and stairway walls.

I've applied what I think is the final layer of joint compound to the nasty stairway wall.

I did some touch-up work on the ceilings in the kitchen and living/dining room.

Comments

[harpnfiddle.livejournal.com]

So now I have a new 40 gallon hot water tank that can be tapped in emergencies. :) When I was growing up, we had an artesian well, and my mother's mantra was "don't flush the toilets" because when the electricity went out and the tank was drained the pump would have to be primed to get it going again if the tank was dry. or something. so we had bathtub water to flush the toilets with. Now they are on town water and use the well water for watering the lawn.

[helwen.livejournal.com]

True! Hm, we had a couple of very small tanks at the house (one for the kitchen and front bathroom, and one for the laundry and back bathroom) -- I suppose it _might_ have been possible to tap those, but the first part of the water probably wouldn't be usable. It may depend on what the water's like in your town. Although Holyoke's water is very good for tap, sediment comes from somewhere in the system (pipes maybe? - we still have some old iron pipes, so I expect others in the city do as well) -- anyway, end result is that L flushes the tank every so often to keep the tank in good working order.

With 40 gallons, even if you have to flush the first few gallons, that's still pretty good :)

We have a practically new tank ourselves (installed last December). So, good for home dwellers, but the apartment dwellers are still out of luck -- hence the storage bin suggestion. I think one of the reasons we did it was because my mom was originally from San Francisco and grew up in apartment buildings -- no individual water tanks.

The problems with flooding that we've been having across the country made me think again on disaster preparedness, so I thought posting this tidbit from my childhood was worthwhile.... Here's hoping none of the folks reading this will have to deal with any of this!